I Don't Like The Dare's Debut Album

Sorry Harrison, I tried.

GRADE: D

BACKGROUND

After moving to New York City in the summer of 2022, I had the fortune of meeting a lot of cool people who would go on to do awesome things. I interviewed Kareem Rahma on the now defunct ANTIART Podcast, but many of you now know him as the host of the best show on TikTok, Subway Takes. I was an extra on the set of Peter Vack’s soon-to-release RachelOrmont.com, where I was seated next to The Ion Pack, in their masks for the very last time. I also met Tyler Bainbridge from Perfectly Imperfect just before that Substack really took off. I was there. I was there…when The Dare first started. I was therreeeee…

Some of you have never heard of this music project before, so let me give a brief synopsis. Harrison Patrick Smith was born in West Hollywood, raised in the Seattle, went to college in Portland, and moved to New York City in 2017. He had previously been in a rock band called Turtlenecked that got some lukewarm praise from sites like Pitchfork and NPR. It wasn’t until he released his debut single as The Dare that things really started turning for him. “Girls” is what I would consider an undeniable hit, even Pitchfork had to give it props in the midst of trashing his subsequent Sex EP. It sonically draws from trashy ‘00s electroclash, with hi-hats that are stolen directly from Peaches’ “Fuck The Pain Away”. The lyrics are foul but fun, with lines like “They say I’m too fuckin’ horny / Wanna put me in a cage / I’d probably fuck the hole in the wall / The guy before made”. The appeal is the uncaring, almost stream-of-consciousness delivery and the lyrical allusions to drugs, guns and cigarettes. Following this was the similar in vibe “Good Time” which released that winter, a track I liked but not as much. It kind of felt like when Olivia Rodrigo dropped “Driver’s License” and industry people were scrambling to have her make a similar sounding song. It ultimately lives in the shadow of it’s predecessor as an inferior but still very hard-hitting single.

“Girls” and “Good Time” both appear on the debut from The Dare, entitled What’s Wrong With New York? People in the Midwest may have just found out about this release from their Spotify recommended, but my peers and I have been waiting for this moment for two years. After giving it three focused listens, I have come to the conclusion that this album is not very good. I really wish this wasn't the case, but so be it.

THE REVIEW

First and foremost, this album doesn’t provide any clarity to the question: “what’s wrong with New York?”, nor do I think a transplant like Harrison is capable of answering that. The record should’ve just been called The Dare since that’s all this man is really singing about, or rather white rapping about. There are some vague references to subways and “going downtown” on the opening cut “Open Up”, but other than that, I fail to see what New York has to do with any of this. The city is where he built his fanbase, but its connection to him feels purely incidental. Like Travis Scott’s last record Utopia, the album isn’t really about anything but narcissistically “turning up”. The worst offender by far is “All Night”, which is about you guessed it, partying all night. The lyrics are so ketamine-brained that he refers to any territory outside NYC and LA city limits as “the other states”. That made me laugh, actually.

The question I’d like to answer for you all is: “what’s wrong with this album?”. My first gripe has to be the lack of interesting melodies and the first-draft quality of most of the lyrics. Let me use “You’re Invited” as the main effigy for this whole concept. Hum the melody of the first verse and chorus and you’ll see how little effort he actually put into it being interesting. The production is just as repetitive, but it at least has an interesting quality to it with those drums and the light ‘80s guitar breaks. The lyrics live in the perverted shadow of “Girls”, so he’s singing about getting a girl pregnant (twice) in the back of a Mercedes. It’s nonsensical, but what the fuck is this song about? “You only smoke reds, I only got blues”, like ok? Calling out a line that like this may seem like a nit-pick, but many of the songs here seems to just be made up of lines like this placed in a row. To me, that speaks to a larger lack of substance and effort throughout The Dare’s work. He has to be this unbothered, suit wearing, downtown player who’s smoking cigarettes and signing big deals, so all the songs have to be about that. If we learned anything from Big Sean, continuing to rap about your success via silly bars is just not appealing in song form. Now that The Dare has blasted off into the stratosphere and is chopping it up with Billie Eilish and Charli xcx, the dive-bar spirit of “Girls” — a song that’s over two years old — just doesn’t feel communal or fresh anymore. The resulting music feels overplayed and out-of-touch on a third listen.

The second and most damning gripe I have is that most of this sounds like LCD Soundsystem. Is James Murphy aware of how close these songs sound to his? Does he even care? It started with “Girls”, which is very similar to “Drunk Girls” by LCD Soundsystem (which was basically a cover of “White Light White Heat by The Velvet Underground). Now on the debut album, there are countless examples on display here from all different eras of the band. The most obvious is “Movement”, which not only shares a title of an LCD song, but interpolates its claps in the last third. It has the same frenetic, post-punk vibe to it as that track as well, complete with screamed vocals that sound just like something Murphy would do. “Movement” on LCD’s debut, alongside cuts like “Daft Punk Is Playing At My House”, genuinely felt like a new wave on the horizon. The Dare’s songs are riding that same wave without adding much to it aside from some more punchy production. The very worst song here, “Perfume”, feels like it’s cribbing from the Sound of Silver-era, with funk guitar riffs and those signature phlegmy Murphy rapped verses and yelped choruses. “Elevation” sounds like a B-side from American Dream, built on a bed of cloudy pads and dreamy key hits. While that album was compelling in its exploration of dead dreams and grief accompanied by ambitious song structures, this song is about, I actually don’t know. There’s no escaping love, and he feels like taking drugs because of it. That’s about it. This album simply does not go deep enough. It’s all “woos!” and bass drops, but what about it is supposed to make me feel something inside?

The core issue with copying LCD Soundsystem this hard is that it exhibits nothing that I love about that band. Even the live show feels like it should have a backing band instead of the current karaoke thing he’s going for. “New York I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down” (omg did he fucking copy that too with the album title) was a heartfelt, sarcastic ode to the city that captured its complex essence. “All My Friends” had amazing melodies and that piano loop is just so universally euphoric. You don’t have to be friends with James Murphy or from New York City to get down with it’s sentiment, it’s just a rush. Many of cuts on Sound of Silver and This Is Happening were made great not just because of Murphy, but because of his incredible band that brought eight-minute jams to life. All the songs were four-minutes minimum and drew from many different sources. The DFA records crew were music purists in that they deeply respected all of these disparate music sources (listen to “Losing My Edge”) and combined them into a product that was greater than the sum of its parts. Harrison listened to all the guys who had to put in leg work — namely LCD Soundsystem and The Chemical Brothers — and called it a day. In order for him to progress past this character and make an album that is original and worthwhile, he is going to need to put in that same work and come up with something brand new. He cannot just be James Murphy for the TikTok era, right?

The only silver lining that this album provides is production and attitude, which often go hand in hand. There is a reason that Charli xcx brought him on to produce “Guess” for her, the dude knows how to create 130-140BPM blasted out, trashy dance music with momentum. The best song here aside from his previous singles is “I Destroyed Disco”, which kind of feels like a preemptive response to this exact review, I’ll explain in a second. The title also sounds like an LCD Soundsystem song. It’s opening is a direct rip from LCD Soundsystem’s “Get Innocuous”, but then it throws that in the trash and actually becomes a good original song. The way this man is delivering these bars on here about how no one is on his level and he’s putting his competition on suicide watch is compelling because for once, it’s not a humble brag. It’s just a regular one. In tandem with bass arpeggios, guitar distortion breakdowns and even a “Sandstorm”-esque trance build up, I get chills. When he insults me as a blogger directly to my face I love that because he’s actually writing a song about something that he feels, and the results show. There is punch and momentum behind it rather than this lame pastiche of cool and lyrics that he probably wrote into his notes app after a hit off a dab pen. This song should’ve been longer in my opinion, this is the sound he really needs to go in the direction of, along with more psychedelic and melodic pop.

Although I tried to leave my Strokes comparisons at the door, I really wish this record could’ve been the Is This It? of the era that I get to live in New York, but it’s just not. I am happy for all of the success and all the pop production placements he will likely get after this release, but I need to separate my New York bias from my criticism. This review is not to shade him as a person, I’ve met him quite a few times and he is a very nice guy, is clearly hard working and the music is resonating with a lot of people. But to my discerning ears, this is a well-produced and put together collection of danceable songs with a few major highlights. Other than that, I found The Dare’s debut to be anemic in its songwriting, lyricism and vocal delivery. I am unconvinced of the supposed “cool” and I just want to hear something more personal and vulnerable. Kanye West made an entire career out of being a bombastic, gooning narcissist. Now, it’s time for Harrison to do the same or try something different with the next record.